y wife and I are waiting for children. Every morning for three months, Joan’s alarm goes off at seven-even if she hasn’t climbed into bed until four or five-and she gropes the night table in the dark for her basal thermometer, slips it under her tongue, hits the snooze bar on her clock…
You took the room in the attic. Watched television by yourself. I used to walk down the dim stairs to the basement to be with you at night, to listen to stories of plantations and dictatorships as you folded with precise care the underpants of my family. You who knew our human stains: faint arrowheads…
The other day I was wondering how to make onion soup, and my mind served up the bowl I had in Seattle just before we shipped out to Yokohama-my first onion soup, with a slice of toasted french bread and some melted Gruyere cheese. This was the end of 1946. I was six and a…
Greens Start simply. Lettuce green (light). Collard green (dark). Endive (deep thick white). Lettuce green (red at the curling edges). Lettuce green (with a spine of white). Mustard green (lace-spice). Cabbages, kales, and Brussels sprouts (yellow past their prime). And escarole (and oh . . .). Endive (the thick white). Greens are my delight. Swiss…
In a coffee can his flower beside loose bricks ledged on a city rowhouse gerrymandered for six kids, roosts of rooms, tilting floors, swayback roof sloping toward a Baltimore shipyard still as a world war watch Iggy Jones, old boilermaker, the belly on him, down to two cigars a day, living off the mailman’s pouch…
Plants & Houses (Northern Thailand) Several months after I come to live in the house, I begin to realize that nothing in the compound exists without effort or purpose. The lush, tangled gardens surrounding us serve as constant reminder that until only recently the neighborhood belonged to the encroaching forest. The house, a perfect cube…
In the practice of my trade, as writer and teacher, I lie by omission, I sometimes think, as much as I tell the truth. I note, for an eager, untalented first-year student, that her story is interesting, that it shows terrific energy, that there’s some marvelous insight here into waking up hungover on Saturday morning…
High. Mindless. Cackle at the edge of the world. And the geese are flying there and crying, for two weeks now they’ve come racketing each morning, miles and miles of them, pouring. Where do they come from, where did they sleep last night? I can’t see them, but the question ticks like a clock about…
When my mother was a teenager, she kept scrapbooks on Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman. She pressed their photographs, magazine clips, and movie stills behind cellophane like dried flowers, and wrote them fan letters which they never answered. Recently, a boy I once baby-sat had “Guns ‘n’ Roses Lives” tattooed on his right shoulder blade….
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